Easy quick divorce and the baby boomer generation
Friday, November 5th, 2010Easy quick divorce and the baby boomer generation
The divorce rate in England and Wales fell to its lowest level for 22 years in 2007, according to official statistics.
But marital breakdown is still an unpleasant reality for hundreds of thousands of couples.
Claire Tyler, Chief Executive of Relate said: “Whilst it is encouraging that the divorce rate has fallen we must not forget that divorce is still a reality for so many families living in the UK today and the emotional fallout can be devastating.
“These figures do not reveal the full extent of relationship breakdown as many couples choose not to marry.
“For the fifth consecutive year men and women in their late twenties have the highest divorce rates, many of whom will have young children.”
For those people confronted with the breakdown of their marriages, the process of getting divorced is a complex and often very expensive one.
There are all sorts of worries at this point: over the future, over money, over being involved in the law, over children (if you have any).
More than 300,000 people will get divorced this year at an average cost of £28,000 per couple.
Men in their late 30s and early 40s are now for the first time as likely to divorce as those under 24. In 1986 the younger men were twice as likely to go through a divorce.
And while ten years ago there were 16,700 divorces in a year involving men in their 50s, in the latest figures the number has risen to 24,700.
Around a quarter of women in their early 40s have now gone through a divorce, compared to just one in ten 25 years ago. The counselling charity Relate said the longer working week, and the trend for partners increasingly to lead separate lifestyles, were factors in the rise in divorces among older couples.
The charity has also warned that websites such as facebook, which can bring old flames from schooldays back together, along with dating websites and new technology such as mobile phones, have made infidelity increasingly easy.
A survey from the Institute for Public Policy Research said that a rising number of the elderly are feeling increasingly lonely because of the numbers of couples breaking up.
The tendency of women to outlive their husbands is also contributing to depression and unhappiness, it found.
The findings echo studies carried out earlier this year which discovered divorce reforms at the end of the 1960s – trebling the number of quick easy divorces – are having a destructive impact on those now reaching old age.
Jessica Allen, the IPPR author, said that 19 per cent of divorced or separated women and 17 per cent of men had increased mental health problems in at least the short term after a relationship breakdown.
She added that a ‘significant contributing factor to low well-being in older people is the number of older people living alone’.
The report said that 2.4million people over 65 – more than one in five pensioners – are estimated to suffer from depression.
Two per cent of pensioners who live with someone else say they are often lonely, compared with 17 per cent of those who live alone.
The report said the growing numbers of women over 75 are nearly twice as likely to live alone as men because of their longer life expectancy.
The number of divorces tripled in the early 1970s after the liberal reforms of 1969 made ‘quickie’ decrees available for the first time.
Mark Keenan is the founder of Divorce-Online.Co.Uk the uk’s leading online divorce website.
000 in attorney fees and 5 years later, Katie encourages couples to do divorce mediation instead of fighting in court!
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